News Clips

He described Crow as a “personal friend,” according to the disclosure form, one of several from the 1990s that is no longer publicly available but was provided to The Washington Post by watchdog organizations Common Cause and Documented.

When I was in the Supreme Court last December listening to oral arguments in Moore v. Harper, I was struck by Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s questions in this case that put the future of American democracy’s checks and balances at risk. Barrett doubted that the “independent state legislature theory” should give state legislatures absolute power to write laws for federal elections without facing state judicial review. And Barrett probed repeatedly about when, if at all, the Supreme Court should intervene in state court interpretations of state constitutions in these election cases.

Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause in Wisconsin, a government watchdog group, said Ms. Wolfe’s removal would be a major blow to the state, which is likely to once again be a crucial battleground for the presidential race. “The vast majority of Wisconsin’s voters and citizens can and will lose confidence and trust in our elections,” he said.

Sean McMorris, a member of government transparency nonprofit California Common Cause, said he’s unsure whether the city needs to eliminate the cap at all. “I know that San Jose is being proactive, but it is not clear to me that the SCOTUS ruling, which pertained to federal campaign finance law and post-election fundraising, would necessarily apply to all local campaign finance laws pertaining to candidate loans or that a city cannot narrowly tailor such a law to avoid running afoul of the SCOTUS ruling,” he wrote in an emailed statement.

All of this is a concern for voting rights groups. Katya Ehresman, voting rights program manager for Common Cause Texas, said its been just four years since the state attempted to purge tens of thousands of people incorrectly identified as noncitizens from the state's voter rolls. The furor over that effort helped to sink Acting Secretary of State David Whitley's bid for confirmation in the post. Ehresman noted that Keith Ingram, who served as elections director under Whitley, was appointed by current Secretary of State Jane Nelson to head the effort to come up with Texas' replacement for ERIC. "I think that’s something that we’re concerned about, is if these lists matching and list maintenance systems are within that same office, that Texas voters should be paying attention and watchdog organizations like ours are going to be paying attention," Ehresman said. Alicia Pierce said voters should not be overly concerned about being removed from the rolls. "They’re not simply removed," Pierce said. "They receive a notice, and then there’s a waiting period before they are removed. And also, under the National Voting Rights Act, there is a window before federal elections, which is 90 days, when people will not be removed through these wholesale actions, where we’re doing large-scale list maintenance. So those are some things that can help reassure people that they’re not going to be removed in an untimely manner." Still, Katya Ehresman said that voters should doublecheck their voting status well in advance of the October deadline for this fall's elections and the February deadline for the 2024 primaries, in order to make sure they're registered at their current address. "I think that Texas leaving ERIC adds a heightened level of vigilance that is needed on the back of everyday voters, which should not be required to participate in their elections but might need to be now," Ehresman said.

But John M. Marion, executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island, called the GOP statement “a knee-jerk reaction to what is a fairly common occurrence in elections all across the country.” “This is not the first time a candidate has withdrawn from a race but remained on the ballot, and it won’t be the last time,” he said. “Restricting a popular and secure way for voters to vote is not the right reaction.” In offering 20 days of early voting, Rhode Island is matching the national average in the 47 states that offer early voting, Marion said. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, the three states that don’t offer early in-person voting are Alabama, Mississippi and New Hampshire, and Marion said Alabama and Mississippi “are two states not exactly known for protecting voting rights”